01 Part 2 - The Present Dilemma in Philosophy - Pragmatism - William James

In point of fact, it is far less an account of this actual world than a clear addition built upon it,

a classic sanctuary in which the rationalist fancy may take refuge from the intolerably confused

and gothic character which mere facts present. It is no explanation of our concrete universe.

It is another thing altogether, a substitute for it, a remedy, a way of escape.

Its temperament, if I may use the word temperament here, is utterly alien to the temperament of

existence in the concrete. Refinement is what characterizes our intellectualist philosophies.

They exquisitely satisfy that craving for a refined object of contemplation which is so

powerful and appetite of the mind. But I ask you in all seriousness to look abroad on this colossal

universe of concrete facts, on their awful bewilderments, their surprises and cruelties,

on the wildness which they show, and then to tell me whether refined is the one inevitable

descriptive adjective that springs to your lips. Refinement has its place in things true enough.

But a philosophy that breathes out nothing but refinement will never satisfy the empiricist

temper of mind. It will seem rather a monument of artificiality.

So we find men of science preferring to turn their backs on metaphysics as on something

altogether cloistered and spectral, and practical men shaking philosophers dust off their feet

in following the call of the wild. Truly there is something a little ghastly in the satisfaction

with which a pure but unreal system will fill a rationalist mind.

Leibniz was a rationalist mind, with infinitely more interest in facts than most rationalist

minds can show. Yet if you wish for superficiality incarnate, we have only to read that charmingly

written theodicy of his, in which he sought to justify the ways of God to man, and to prove that

the world will live in is the best or possible worlds. Let me quote a specimen of what I mean.

Among other obstacles to his optimistic philosophy, it falls to Leibniz to consider the number

of the eternally damned. That it is infinitely greater in our human case than that of those saved,

he assumes as a premise from the Theologians, and then proceeds to argue in this way. Even then,

he says, the evil will appear as almost nothing in comparison with the good if we once considered

the real magnitude of the city of God. Quelios II's Courier has written a little book,

The Amplitodine Regni Quelestis, which was reprinted not long ago. But he failed to

compose the extent of the kingdom of the heavens. The ancients had small ideas of the works of God.

It seemed to them that only our earth had inhabitants, and even the notion of our antipodes gave them

pause. The rest of the world for them consisted of some shining globes and a few crystalline spheres.

But today, whatever be the limits that we may grant refuse to the universe,

we must recognize in it a countless number of globes as big as ours or bigger,

which have just as much right as it has to support rational inhabitants, though it does not follow that

these need all be men. Our earth is only one among the six principal satellites of our sun.

As all the fixed stars are suns, one sees how small a place among visible things our earth

takes up, since it is only a satellite of one among them. Now all these suns may be inhabited

by no one but happy creatures. And nothing obliges to believe that the number of damned persons

is very great. For a very few instances and samples suffice for the utility which good draws

from evil. Moreover, since there is no reason to suppose that there are stars everywhere,

may there not be a great space beyond the region of the stars. And this immense space surrounding

all this region may be replete with happiness and glory. What now becomes of the consideration

of our earth and of its denizens? Does it not dwindle to something incomparably less than a physical

point since our earth is but a point compared with the distance of the fixed stars? Thus the part

of the universe which we know being almost lost in nothing as compared with that which is unknown

to us, but which we are yet obliged to admit. And all the evils that we know lying in this

almost nothing, it follows that the evils may be almost nothing in comparison with the goods

that the universe contains. Leibniz continues elsewhere. There is a kind of justice which aims

neither at the amendment of the criminal nor at furnishing an example to others nor at the

reparation of the injury. This justice is founded in pure fitness which finds a certain satisfaction

in the expiation of a wicked deed. The Succineans and Hobbes objected to this punitive justice which

is properly vindictive justice and which God has reserved for himself at many junctures.

It is always founded in the fitness of things and satisfies not only the offended party but all

wise lookers on, even as beautiful music or a fine piece of architecture satisfies a well constituted

mind. It is thus that the tourments of the damned continue, even though they serve no longer to

turn anyone away from sin, and that the rewards of the blessed continue, even though they confirm

no one in good ways. The damned draw to themselves every new penalties by their continuing sins,

and the blessed attract ever-fresh joys by their unceasing progress in good. Both facts are

founded on the principle of fitness. For God has made all things harmonious in perfection,

as I have already said. Lie in its feeble grasp of reality is too obvious to need command from me.

It is evident that no realistic image of the experience of a damned soul had ever approached the

portals of his mind. Nor had it occurred to him that the smaller is the number of samples of the

genus lost soul whom God throws as a sub to their eternal fitness, the more unequitably grounded

is the glory of the blessed. What it gives us is a cold literary exercise whose cheerful substance

even hellfire does not warm. And do not tell me that to show the shallowness of rationalist

philosophizing, I have had to go back to a shallow, wicked age. The optimism of present-day

rationalism sounds just as shallow to the fact-loving mind. The actual universe is a thing wide open,

but rationalism makes systems and systems must be closed. For men in practical life,

perfection is something far off and still in process of achievement. This for rationalism

is but the illusion of the finite and relative. The absolute ground of things is a perfection

eternally complete. I find a fine example of revolt against this airy and shallow optimism

of current religious philosophy in a publication of that valiant anarchistic writer Morrison I Swift.

Mr Swift's anarchism goes a little farther than mine does, but I confess that I sympathize a good

deal and some of you I know will sympathize heartily with his dissatisfaction with the idealistic

optimism now invoked. He begins his pamphlet on human submission with a series of city reporters

items from newspapers, suicides, deaths from starvation and the like, as specimens of our

civilized regime. For instance, after trudging through the snow from one end of the city to the

other in the vain hope of securing employment and with his wife and six children without food

and ordered to leave their home in an upper east side tenement house because of non-payment of

rent, John Corcoran, a clerk, today ended his life by drinking carbolic acid. Corcoran lost his

position three weeks ago through illness and during the period of idleness his scanty savings

disappeared. Yesterday he obtained work with a gang of city snow shovelers, but he was too

weak from illness and was forced to quit after an hour's trial with a shovel. Then the weary

task of looking for employment was again resumed. Thorily discouraged, Corcoran returned to his

home last night to find his wife and children without food and the notice of dispossession on the

door. On the following morning he drank the poison. The records of many more such cases lie

before me. Mr. Swift goes on, an uncyclopedia might easily be filled with her kind.

These few I cite as an interpretation of the universe. We are aware of the presence of God

in his world, says a writer in a recent English review. The very presence of ill in the temporal

order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order, writes Professor Royce.

The world and the individual, part two, page 385. The absolute is the richer for every discord

and for all diversity which it embraces, says F. H. Bradley, appearance and reality,

page 244. He means that these slain men make the universe richer, and that is philosophy.

But while Professor Royce and Bradley and a whole host of guileless, thoroughfed thinkers

are unveiling reality and the absolute and explaining away evil and pain,

this is the condition of the only beings known to us anywhere in the universe with a developed

consciousness of what the universe is. What these people experience is reality. It gives us an

absolute face of the universe. It is the personal experience of those most qualified in all our

circle of knowledge to have experience to tell us what is. Now, what does thinking about

the experience of these persons come to compared with directly personally feeling it as they feel it?

The philosophers are dealing in shades while those who live and feel no truth,

and the mind of mankind, not yet the mind of philosophers and of the propriety class,

but of the great mass of the silently thinking and feeling men, is coming to this view.

They are judging the universe as they have here too for permitted the hero fans of religion

and learning to judge them. This Cleveland, working man, killing his children and himself

another of the sighted cases, is one of the elemental, stupendous facts of this modern world

and of this universe. It cannot be glosed over or minimized away by all the treatises on God

and love and being helplessly existing in their haute monumental vacuity.

This is one of the simple irreducible elements of this world's life after millions of years of

divine opportunity and twenty centuries of Christ. It is in the moral world like atoms or sub-atoms

in the physical, primary, indestructible. And what it blazes to man is the imposter of all philosophy

which does not see in such events the consummate factor of conscious experience.

These facts, invincibly prove religion and nullity. Man will not give religion two thousand

centuries or twenty centuries more to try itself and waste human time. Its time is up,

its probation is ended, its own record ends it. Mankind has not sons and eternities to spare

for trying out discredited systems. Footnote, Morrison Eyes Swift, human submission,

part-second Philadelphia Liberty Press, 1905, pages four to ten.

Such is the reaction of an empiricist mind upon the rationalist bill of fair.

It is an absolute no-eye thank you. Religion, says Mr. Swift, is like a sleepwalker to whom

actual things are blank. And such, though possibly less tensely charged with feeling,

is the verdict of every seriously inquiring amateur in philosophy today who turns to the philosophy

professors for they were will to satisfy the fullness of his nature's needs. Ampericist writers

give him a materialism, rationalists give him something religious, but to that religion

actual things are blank. He becomes thus the judge of us philosophers. Tender or tough,

he finds us wanting. None of us may treat his verdicts distainfully. For after all,

he is the typically perfect mind. The mind, the sum of whose demands is greatest.

The mind whose criticisms and dissatisfactions are fatal in the long run.

It is at this point that my own solution begins to appear. I offer the oddly-named thing

pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand. It can remain religious,

like the rationalisms, but at the same time, like the empiricisms, it can preserve the richest

intimacy with facts. I hope I may be able to leave many of you with as favorable an opinion of

it as I preserve myself. Yet, as I am near the end of my hour, I will not introduce pragmatism

bodily now, I will begin with it on the stroke of the clock next time. I prefer at the present

moment to return a little on what I have said. If any of you hear our professional philosophers and

some of you I know to be such, you will doubtless have felt my discourse so far to have been crude

in an unpardonable, nay in an almost incredible degree. Tender-minded and tough-minded,

what a barbaric disjunction. And, in general, when philosophy is all compacted of delicate

intellectualities and subtleties and script velocities, and when every possible sort of

combination and transition obtains within its bounds, what a brutal caricature and reduction of

highest things to the lowest possible expression is it to represent its field of conflict as a sort

of rough and tumble fight between two hostile temperaments. What a childishly external view.

And again, how stupid it is to treat the abstractness of rationalist systems as a crime,

and to damn them because they offer themselves as sanctuaries and places of escape,

rather than as proligations of the world of facts. Are not all our theories just remedies and

places of escape? And if philosophy is to be religious, how can she be anything else than a

place of escape from the craftness of reality's surface? What better thing can she do than

raises out of our animal senses and shows us another and a nobler home for our minds in that

great framework of ideal principles, subtending all reality, which the intellect divides?

How can principles and general views ever be anything but abstract outlines?

Was Cologne Cathedral built without an architect's plan on paper?

Is refinement in itself an abomination? Is concrete rudeness the only thing that's true?

Believe me, I feel the full force of the indictment. The picture I have given is indeed

monstrously oversimplified and rude. But like all abstractions, it will prove to have its use.

If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an

abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself. In point of fact, the picture I have given is,

however coarse and sketchy, literally true. Temperaments with their cravings and refusals

do determine men in their philosophies and always will. The details of systems may be

reasoned out piecemeal, and when the student is working at a system, he may often forget the

forest for the single tree. But when labor is accomplished, the mind always performs its big

summarizing act, and the system forthwith stands over against one like a living thing,

where that strange, simple note of individuality which haunts our memory, like the

wrath of the man when a friend or enemy of ours is dead. Not only Walt Whitman could write,

who touches this book touches a man. The books of all the great philosophers are like so many men.

Our sense of an essential personal flavor in each one of them, typical but indescribable,

is the finest fruit of our own accomplished philosophic education. What the system pretends to be

is a picture of the great universe of God. What it is, and also flagrantly, is the revelation

of how intensely odd the personal flavor of some fellow creature is. Once reduced to these terms,

and all our philosophies get reduced to them in minds made critical by learning, our commerce

with the systems reverts to the informal, to the instinctive human reaction of satisfaction or

dislike. We grow as paramptory in our rejection or admission as when a person presents himself as

a candidate for our favor. Our verdicts are couched in as simple adjectives of praise or

dispraise. We measure the total character of the universe as we feel it against the flavor of

the philosophy profitus, and one word is enough. Stutt der Lebedeegin Natur, we say,

der Gott dimension schuft hinein. That nebulous concoction, that wooden, that straight-laced

thing, that crabbed artificiality, that musty schoolroom product, that sick man's dream,

our way with it, our way with all of them, impossible, impossible. Our work over the details of

his system is indeed what gives us our resultant impression of the philosopher, but it is on the

resultant impression itself that we react. Expertness in philosophy is measured by the

definetness of our summarizing reactions, by the immediate perceptive epithet, with which the

expert hits such complex objects off. But great expertness is not necessary for the epithet to come.

Few people have definitely articulated philosophies of their own, but almost everyone has

its own peculiar sense of a certain total character in the universe, and of the inadequacy fully

to match it of the peculiar system that he knows. They don't just cover his world. One will be

too dapper, another too pedantic, a third too much of a job lot of opinions, a fourth to morbid,

and a fifth to artificial or what not. At any rate he and we, no offhand, that such philosophers

are out of plumb and out of key and out of whack and have no business to speak up in the universe's

name. Plato, Locke, Spinoza, Mill, Caird, Hegel, I prudently avoid names nearer home.

I am sure that to many of you, my hearers, these names are little more than reminders of

as many curious personal ways of falling short. It would be an obvious absurdity of such

ways of taking the universe were actually true. We philosophers have to reckon with such feelings

on our part. In the last resort, I repeat, it will be by them that all our philosophies shall

ultimately be judged. The finally victorious way of looking at things will be the most

completely impressive way to the normal run of minds. One word more, namely about philosophies

necessarily being abstract outlines. There are outlines and outlines, outlines of buildings that are

fat, conceived in the cube by their planner, and outlines of buildings invented flat on paper

with a aid of rule and compass. These remain skinny and emaciated even when set up in stone and

mortar, and the outline already suggests that results. An outline in itself is meager,

truly, but it does not necessarily suggest a meager thing. It is the essential meagerness of

what is suggested by the usual rationalistic philosophies that moves empiricists to their

gesture of rejection. The case of Herbert Spencer's system is much to the point here.

Rationalists feel his fearful array of insufficiencies. His dry schoolmaster temperament,

the hurdy-gurdy monotony of him, his presence for cheap makeshifts in argument,

his lack of education even in mechanical principles, and in general the vagueness of all his

fundamental ideas, his whole system woulden as if knocked together out of cracked hemlock boards.

And yet the hearth of England wants to bury him in Westminster Abbey. Why? Why does Spencer call

out so much reverence in spite of his weakness in rationalistic eyes? Why should so many educated

men who feel that weakness, you and I perhaps, wish to see him in the Abbey, not the standing?

Simply because we feel his heart to be in the right place philosophically. His principles may

be all skin and bone, but at any rate his books try to mold themselves upon the particular shape

of this particular world's corpus. The noise of facts resounds through all his chapters.

The citations of fact never cease. He emphasizes facts, turns his face towards the recorder,

and that is enough. It means the right kind of thing for the empiricist mind.

The pragmatistic philosophy of which I hope to begin talking in my next lecture

preserves as cordial a relation with facts and, unlike Spencer's philosophy, it neither begins nor ends

by turning positive religious constructions out of doors. It treats them cordially as well.

I hope I may lead you to find it just the mediating way of thinking that you require.

And of lecture one.